1. Introduction 2. Wilkie Collins and Narrative Containment 3. Anthony Trollope: Gender, Law and the Psychological 4. Density, Will and Desire: Henry James, Aesthetics and the Subjective Turn 5. Emily's Will: George Gissing, Wage Labour and Aesthetic Desire 6. Sexuality and National Containment: E. M. Forster 7. Aim, Object and Fictional Strategy: Freud and Case Study Narrative Coda: The Burial of 'The Dead'

Between 1870 and 1910 male authors were actively engaged with imagining new possibilities for women, at the same time as the central female figure continued to function as a troubling and unreachable object of aesthetic desire. This book examines these inscrutable female characters who were the ground on which fiction reinvented itself as Art.

Meredith Miller has published widely on gender, sexuality and popular fiction. She is the author of The Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature (Scarecrow Press, 2006). She came to the UK in 1997, and completed her DPhil in English at the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence at University of Sussex in 2001. Her particular area of interest centres on cultural materialism, gender, sexuality and the history of the novel. She has taught widely around the US and the UK, and is also a published writer of fiction.